Mortlach 12 Year Old The Wee Witchie

Tasting Notes

• Tasting Notes from Billy Abbott, The Whisky Exchange

  • Nose

    Nutty fruit cake with juicy sultanas, candied ginger and bittersweet marmalade. Fruity dark chocolate sits underneath, along with baked apples topped with a generous grating of nutmeg. Gravelly touches develop, with walnuts and hazelnuts, and a touch of nut-shell woodiness. The nuts become nut brittle and candied peanuts, and more fruit appears: tropical trail mix and dried apple rings.

  • Palate

    Rich toffee and brown sugar. Soft sultanas and spiced sponge cake follow. Spice rolls in – cinnamon and clove – with raisin-topped baked apples dusted with caster sugar. Poached pear notes develop, drizzled with caramel sauce and served with a side of apple jelly.

  • Finish

    Charred raisins and sultanas, sharp apples and their skin. This sweetens and becomes lingering tarte tatin.

  • Comment

    Well balanced, combining darker sherry notes with fresher orchard-fruit flavours, all while emphasising the distillery’s weighty character.

• Producer's Notes

  • Nose

    Rich and deep, with immediate warming, toasty oak tones (wood shavings) and a light peachy element that moves towards honey and then cooked fruits hinting at good depth. Some chestnut helps to add a sweet nutty background alongside hints of wax crayon. This impression of oak, sandalwood, light spice, and fruit - now with some dried berries - slowly gives way to some charred elements, hard (Highland) toffee and some light meatiness. Once this is established (and it takes time) it starts to deepen, earthy, petrichor, (the smell of early autumn), dried blossom, pineapple and bitter orange that itself extends into Terry’s chocolate orange and then cooked plum. As it dries so the woodland gives way to a coal bunker/lichen encrusted logs in a woodpile.

  • Body

    Medium to heavy, with a thick texture.

  • Palate

    A sweet, almost peachy, concentrated start with a little oak and almost smoky (charred) element. It’s at its most expressive on the mid-palate where you pick out bitter chocolate, marmalade and light tobacco that’s balanced by a puddle of syrup before it deepens further and starts to grip, there’s liquorice, roast chestnut, tree bark, roasting coffee, and a burnt edge which might be the sulphur working its way out. As it develops so you get bourbon biscuit, then the meaty flavours which themselves have the herbal qualities of goat or lamb. The grip loosens, and light gets back in with things getting sweeter and also more spicy.

  • Finish

    Quite dry and slightly sooty/ashy with oak (fresh-sawn timber). There’s some plum with an added hint of bitterness.